


Anamnesis

by corgasbord



Category: Fate/Grand Order, Fate/stay night & Related Fandoms
Genre: Drinking, Emetophobia, Gen, Historical References, Not Incest, seriously if you want incest just don't interact
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-22
Updated: 2020-10-22
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:15:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27150970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corgasbord/pseuds/corgasbord
Summary: Nobukatsu gets himself into a mess again. As always, his elder sister is the one who begrudgingly cleans it up.
Relationships: Oda Nobukatsu | Archer & Oda Nobunaga | Archer
Comments: 2
Kudos: 19





	Anamnesis

**Author's Note:**

> it's been a very long time since i last posted here but in my defense, i've posted more on my other social media, and 2020 has been hellish. don't even worry about it.
> 
> anyways, a friend requested this concept of me and i just had to write it. a year and a half ago i wrote a fic about nobukatsu that i don't really like anymore (and which kind of... doesn't hold up in some places in light of the most recent gudaguda lore) but i do still love him and think his relationship with his sister warrants a lot of exploration... preferably of the normal sibling kind. so! here i am, airing my opinion that nobunaga's feelings about her brother are a lot more complicated than "man, i can't stand this guy," in celebration of the fact that he's finally playable! enjoy, my fellow gudaguda fans

In retrospect, Nobunaga thinks, it was probably her fault that she hadn’t thought to stash her sake away after last night. Left out on the low table in the golden tea room her entourage spends so much time in, anyone could get their hands on it. In fact, she’d fully expected to find the skull emptied, its contents pilfered by the Dragon of Echigo or that man-slayer Okita so often butts heads with.

For some reason, it hadn’t even crossed her mind that it would be her brother’s body she’d find sprawled on the floor, hatless and tangled up in his own cape.

He sees her, or at least her boots. She knows because his head rolls and his glazed eyes widen. His palm flattens itself out and lifts, inching feebly across the floor and then up, up enough to catch on the lip of the table.

“Sister,” he murmurs, voice thick with the alcohol. “Sister I, I can explain…”

She arches an eyebrow. “Explain what, Nobukatsu? My missing sake, or this shameful display?”

The display to which she’s referring, of course, is his weak attempt to use the table to drag himself upright. It could be called half-successful if draping his torso over the surface of it could be called “sitting.” As it stands, she’s more inclined to liken his jerking, stilted movements to those of a beached trout.

“Your sake, uh. I can get you more, so, so don’t be mad, pl… urk.”

He wobbles now, spine held up on one shaking arm. One knee supports his body while his other foot plants itself beneath him. It is only when he tries to rise that he realizes, moments too late, that he has stepped on his cape, and his own weight sends him tumbling back onto his side.

Her eye twitches with irritation. “You know, I’m not mad that you took my sake without asking. I’d have given you some, even, if I thought you could handle it. But I have to say, this is pretty pathetic.” She paces closer, up to the edge of the table, and stoops to grab her gilded skull and will it to dissipate into dust of the same color. “This cup didn’t even hold a lot to begin with, and you’re rolling around as if you’d downed a whole bottle.”

“I-I’m fine… s’not that bad, really, look.”

He forces himself up onto one elbow. His opposite hand scrambles for purchase on something, anything, to pull himself up with. His fingers catch on her pants leg, just above her knee guard, and hook in tight.

“Oh, no, you don’t-” Her hand lowers to the crown of his head and pushes just enough that she hopes it will dislodge him. “I won’t have you yanking my clothes like that, let go of me!”

He does, and promptly pukes on her shoes.

_“Wait, Nobukatsu-”_

_But it was too late to stop the stream of watery bile from spilling onto the tatami. The only thing Nobunaga could do in that situation was sigh and gather stray strands of her brother’s hair to hold them behind his head, keeping them out of the way until his heaving stopped._

_When it was done, he wiped his mouth on the back of his arm and looked up at her with glossy, ashamed eyes. “I-I’m sorry, Sister. I didn’t mean to, to make a mess…”_

_Nobunaga knew she had plenty of reasons to be mad at him. On her own, she’d successfully sneaked entire jugs of sake out from under clan elders’ noses, not so much because she enjoyed the drink as she enjoyed the uniquely adolescent thrill of doing something that she wasn’t supposed to do. She hadn’t expected that her brother would be completely unable to keep it down. She hadn’t anticipated the mess, something she would now have to get rid of so as to avoid a beating from their mother._

_Still, whenever he quivered as he did then, painfully close to tears, she found that she couldn’t get angry. Her seething temper would be soothed as quickly as it swelled, replaced by amused resignation._

_“Well, I guess it can’t be helped,” she said with a pat on his back. “You really are still a kid, after all. I should’ve figured this would happen if even the smell made you gag.”_

_Nobukatsu’s gaze fell. “But you managed to make it look so easy.”_

_“That’s just because I’ve done this so many times before. Everyone coughs a little the first time, no big deal.” She grinned, then, finger poised to poke his side. “If anything, the look on your face when you got your first taste was hilarious!”_

_“S-Sister, please, don’t make fun of me,” he whined._

_At that, he was met with more laughter and a hand to pull him upright. “Alright, consider this all forgotten if you help me clean up. Mother might let you off easy for this, but she’ll have my hide if she finds out.”_

Nobunaga could probably say that it always comes back around to this: Nobukatsu makes a mess, and it falls upon her to clean it up, with or without his help. In this case, he doesn’t seem in a state to do much. He’s exerting most of his effort just walking down the hall, even with one arm pulled over her shoulders.

“It’s lucky for me that you’ve got no meat on your bones. Honestly, to think you’d get so hammered that you can’t even hold yourself up, and all off of one cup of sake…”

As she speaks, she slides the door to his room open and hauls him inside. He’s mumbling something, but whatever it is, she doesn’t care enough to make it out. She’s focused instead on pulling him into the bathroom, the nearest room with a sink. She knows better than to think he would be able to keep himself steady while she cleans him up, so she dumps him unceremoniously onto the toilet, ass-first, and hopes that he won’t fall off.

To his credit, he doesn’t. He leans against the back of it, head tilted awkwardly, and watches her wait for the water to warm up with strangely clouded eyes.

“What were you even thinking, anyway?” she says, less a real question than a complaint. “Of all the stupid… I mean, last I checked, you don’t even _like_ alcohol. And you weren’t going to impress anyone, drinking all by yourself.”

“I just-” He breathes, blinks. “Wanted to see if I could handle it. Never really, ah. Tried it even after I grew up, but now I’m a Servant, so…”

“Idiot. Being a Servant doesn’t make alcohol more likely to agree with you.” At least, that’s probably the case. Nobukatsu seems a brilliant example of that.

She wrings the cloth she’s just dampened out over the sink and leans over to smear it across his face. His eyes and nose scrunch up at the contact, but she pays the uncomfortable whimper he makes no mind, only giving him a sharp “stay still” when he tries to turn his head away. He complies, if only because he’s always done every foolish thing she ever told him to go along with.

“Ugh. Well, at least you didn’t get any of it on your own clothes, so only my boots suffered.”

Nobukatsu’s gaze slants again. “M’sorry…”

“Don’t start with that. Talking will only make your headache worse.”

“Ah… you’re right, my head. It does hurt.”

“Because you won’t be quiet,” Nobunaga huffs as she cuts through the sweat plastering his bangs to his forehead. “Seriously, if you’re going to act like a sick child, at least pretend to be as agreeable as one.”

_Nobunaga was never agreeable, sick or otherwise. It was a good thing she grew up hardy enough not to catch cold often, or surely at some point the family’s servants would have thrown up their hands in defeat at her behavior and left her to cough herself to sleep. She joked about this frequently to her brother, weak as he was, the kind of person who would get fevers every winter and get waited on hand and foot for it. He didn’t need her there to take care of him. He would request her presence anyway, if only for someone to talk to._

_Every time, he told her that if she were ever in the same position, by some chance, he would return the favor. One day, when they were both too old to pretend that they were friends anymore, she decided to put his long-past promise to the test._

_“I must say, Sister, you’ve chosen a rather bad time to fall ill. Don’t you think?”_

_“Hah!” She let her laugh shake out more like a cough. “And here I thought you’d never get a sense of humor, Nobukatsu. Yet you’ve come all this way to Kiyosu Castle to make a mockery of me.”_

_“Oh, hardly. It’s not a very long way here at all—not that any distance is great enough to stop me from being worried about my big sister.”_

_“Nor the disapproval of your vassals, it seems.”_

_“No, they’re nothing to be worried about, either,” Nobukatsu said with a thin-lipped smile. Through narrowed eyes, she watched him squeeze a wet cloth out over a wooden bucket and kneel to pull away the one already folded over her forehead. “My men can say whatever they want. They won’t disobey me, anyway, and rest assured… my loyalty lies with you, Sister.”_

_She could have laughed again at that, were she not feigning weakness. She already knew his words to be a lie. Shibata had told her as much: her brother planned to mobilize his forces to betray her once more. That was the only reason she remained prone here. There would come a moment when Nobukatsu let his guard down, and at that point she would call upon her men and put him down for good, as she should have long ago._

_Naturally, it occurred to her that he could kill her here and now, if he so chose. The guards she had stationed outside her bedchamber wouldn’t be able to stop him in time, even if the retribution they delivered would be swift. What kept him from doing so was anyone’s guess. It could have been fear of his own death, sure to follow hers. It could have been because he'd prefer to make an example of her in battle. It could have been something else._

_“I see,” was all she said, and closed her eyes._

_If the truth continued to elude her, then that was fine. Only a fool could understand a fool, and the mantle of Owari’s greatest fool was one she’d shed a long time ago._

Finally, Nobukatsu settles down. That makes wiping up his face quick work. While he’s still seated somewhat upright, she hands him a cup of water, too—tap water, but at the very least it’s clean.

“Drink this. All of it,” she says. “You should take a nap afterwards, and hopefully by the time you wake up it won’t feel like your skull’s been split down the middle.”

He complies with messy gulps that dribble down his chin. She bites back the annoyed remark she wants to make about how she’d just cleaned his face, letting a deep sigh out through her nose instead. It is in moments like these when she’s not sure why she bothers.

She knows he wonders the same thing. She knows because he has asked in similar situations, and when he’s finally drunk his fill and gasped for air he asks again, “Why… why’d you go to the trouble, Sister?”

“Why? Well, that’s not anything that you’d need to think too hard about,” she says, hands spread with a shrug. “It’s my responsibility to clean up any messes my family is responsible for, is it not? It would reflect poorly on me otherwise. Besides, you’d have embarrassed me if I’d let you continue to loll around like that in the common area.”

“I see… I guess even in a place like this your reputation matters, huh.” His eyes have begun to lid now, hazy less with drink than with exhaustion. He could pass out at any moment. “I’ll be more careful in the future, Sister…”

She dismisses his assurance with a wave. “Yeah, yeah. Don’t worry about all of that now. Didn’t I tell you to stop talking, anyway?”

“Ah, s’right... sorry.”

This time, she doesn’t bother to correct him. Instead, she can take solace in the fact that this will likely be long gone from his memory by the time he wakes up.

_Nobunaga slept a lot during her stay in Kiyosu Castle. There was nothing better to do; if she moved around too much, her brother would suspect that she was faking her illness._

_She knew that he checked in on her often. In those times when she rested her eyelids, meditating more than dozing, he would poke his head into her bedchamber to see how she was doing. She could hear his muffled conversations with the guards beyond her door. She didn’t know how he negotiated it, but sometimes he would step inside to replace her head cloth and then leave as if he’d never been there at all._

_Once, what he brought in wasn’t a fresh bucket of water, but a steaming, sweet-smelling cup. She could hear the ceramic placed against the tatami and the shuffling of his sandals, muted as if to make a quick exit._

_“Nobukatsu,” she said, voice soft._

_“Hm?” He peered back at her, saw her eyes cracked and her lips pulled down. “Ah, Sister, you’re awake. Here, I made you some tea.”_

_“Mm. Even when breathing is troublesome, I can smell it.” Laboriously, she heaved herself up onto her palms, face tilted towards it with interest. Nobukatsu’s hands moved as if to catch her from what he believed would be the inevitable loss of her balance, but she lazily lifted her palm to stop him, shoulders slumped. “Don’t touch me. Just give it here.”_

_“Ah, as you wish.”_

_He passed the cup carefully into her palms, and she inhaled its fumes through her mouth as if she could taste those alone. “It looks almost as good as mine... heh. Tell me, Nobukatsu.” She balanced the cup in one palm, mouth quirked. “You didn’t poison this, did you?”_

_“Wha...” He balked, not with an incriminating fear, but with the same pallid shock that used to come over his face whenever she did something dangerous. “That’s, that’s absurd, Sister! I would never-”_

_“Relax. It was a joke.” Nonchalantly, she lifted the cup to her lips and took a long, slow drink. “Seems you haven’t changed much at all.”_

_He frowned. “I can’t say I know what you mean.”_

_“Don’t worry about that. I’m more interested in something else.” She cradled the cup close to her lap and looked him in the eye, something she hadn’t done for as long as she could remember. “Why do the servants’ job for them? Other people bring me my meals and manage my fever. I didn’t ask you to even check on me, yet here you are, lowering yourself to perform such menial tasks.”_

_She was curious to see if that would be the thing that offended him. Instead, he smiled so warmly that she almost felt as if she truly did have a fever._

_“I haven’t gotten many opportunities to take care of you, have I?” he asked. “But you’ve always done the same for me, so it’s only natural that I’d be happy to pay you back for all those times before.”_

_“Is that so,” Nobunaga said after a long pause. Her hands tightened around her cup to keep it from slipping. It was all she could do to drink again, to swallow her surprise that he did still remember that, after all. “Well, I think you’ve done enough here, then. Leave me to enjoy my tea in peace.”_

_“Of course, Sister.”_

_He left her with that, a respectful bow, and more questions than she’d had when he first arrived. She knew that if she were to ask anything else, it would only make her angry, whether he told the truth or not. He was an unapologetic sycophant, a two-faced scoundrel worthy of a dog’s death. This, she had told herself from the first time he betrayed her, and she would not let him live to make a third attempt._

_That must be why she felt her stomach twist on itself as though she really were sick—a feeling that didn’t leave until long after he took his last gasping breath at her feet._

It doesn’t take long after Nobukatsu’s head hits the pillow for him to fall unconscious. Nobunaga had expected as much. If he doesn’t have the stamina to even tolerate liquor, then it’s only a matter of course that it would sap the rest of his strength. To think that this is what their poor Master has to waste magical energy on.

She sighs and shakes her head, a concession of defeat that no one but her can witness. She can scold him when he’s had his rest, and when he’s sober enough that maybe he won’t burst into tears on the spot. Or maybe she won’t bother. Maybe she’s already meddled enough, and it’s best that the only thing she takes from this is a reminder to keep a more careful eye on her sake from now on.

Her brother is pitiful. This has always been true, but now especially: his clothes rumpled, his hair askew, drooling on himself still as though he were a child. He is more pathetic than she has ever allowed herself to look, even at her most vulnerable. She has always had every reason to be angry about this. She could never have let herself be what he always was, even if she had ever cared enough to let her emotions leak like an open wound.

(But she supposes that cannot be helped, either: in some manner of speaking, he never really stopped being a child.)

“What a fool,” she murmurs, tearing her gaze away.

It’s a hypocritical statement. She knows that she could never shake the hold that the title of “Fool” always had on her. It followed her in much the same way that Nobukatsu had, a specter hidden in her shadow.

How spectacularly she must live up to it, now, to be looking over her shoulder at the past she’d sworn to leave where it was.

**Author's Note:**

> the lore behind this fic comes from an account of nobukatsu's death that fgo seems to have adapted as of gudaguda 5. before having him killed, nobunaga was supposedly warned of nobukatsu's dissent by katsuie shibata and faked illness while in kiyosu castle to get him to lower his guard. am i still taking liberties with it? of course i am. this is already borderline historical rpf so i can do what i want
> 
> of course, if you liked it comments are appreciated as always!


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